Archive for nonfiction – Page 2

Nonfiction:A Companion to the Fairy Tale edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri is what is says on the tin. The introduction and the first couple of essays gave me a pretty good grounding in fairy tale scholarship as it stood at the time (2006), at least so far as I can tell. I had fun comparing arguments about how tales should be recorded with similar arguments I remember from my anthropology background about how ethnography should be recorded, and how methods of recording data affect the scholarship that follows.

Even though I remember being somewhat distressed by some of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen when I was a kid, an essay on his work has made me want to give him another try, particularly if I can find a library copy of the recommended translation (by R.P. Keigwin). Maybe not all of them will traumatize me? Also, I would now like to read the tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, which sound fascinating, and which were new to me.

In the chapter about cumulative tales, the author has a lot of fun with language while exploring the nuances of “The Pancake,” “The Gingerbread Man,” etc.. I especially enjoyed the chapter on helpers and adversaries, which gave me a lot of Thoughts about these figures in genre fiction. “Finding the First Fairy Tales” also gave me a lot to think about, and reminded me that one day I want to get back to reading Classics in translation. “Unknown Cinderella: The Contribution of Marian Roalfe Cox to the Study of the Fairytale” by Pat Schaefer was really interesting from a historical perspective – I’d like to read more about Cox at some point.

Poetry:
In the same fairy tale vein, I read and enjoyed Shadowskin, a poem by Shveta Thakrar at Strange Horizons.

Fiction:The Half-Back by Ralph Henry Barbour was published in 1909, and features a Big Football Game between thinly disguised Harvard and Yale. Interesting historical bits: “some pumpkins” was still in use as an expression; “cars” were streetcars, and the sound of their bells was frequent and distinctive; “coach” was still used for a horse-drawn vehicle.

I don’t remember this from other Barbour I’ve read, but this time athletics were touted several times as being good to clear the mind for intense study; one of the virtues of the protagonist, Joel, is that he convinces his dedicated golfer friend that he needs to study more, and the friend’s class standing improves. However, the boy who reads adventure tales and wants to be a writer turns out to do a Bad Thing. The chief ‘villain,’ who begins the book by insulting the hero, later shows his badness further through petty revenge and cowardice, but by the end appears humble and redeemed; his redemption happened entirely offstage.

Comics:
I’d been saving Hawkeye Vol. 3: L.A. Woman by Matt Fraction for a special occasion. This collection is All Kate Bishop, All the Time, something I’d been wanting. Kate gets annoyed at Clint and takes off for California, bringing Pizza Dog/Lucky with her to enjoy some fun in the sun. Alas, she ends up fighting Madame Masque and her bellboy goons, but makes friends with a nice gay couple and some weird noir guy she meets in the catfood aisle. The artist has changed more than once in this series, but the clean, open, artsy style has mostly remained consistent throughout. This is the first time I’ve seen work by Annie Wu, and I really liked her take on the characters.

Subjective Histories by Odsbodkins: Captain America’s biography keeps getting delayed by S.H.I.E.L.D. due to certain revelations about the exact relationship between Steve and Bucky.

The Hand-me-downers by Vehemently: a Dark Angel/Supernatural crossover which cleverly makes use of Jensen Ackles’ roles in both shows. A middle-aged Dean Winchester believes Alec is his son. Alec knows otherwise.

Fiction:Bring On the Dusk by M. L. Buchman – I’d read and enjoyed a previous book in this series, but this one ended up being a DNF, despite having a female military helicopter pilot as protagonist. I liked the neepery about flying and about climbing giant redwoods, but the romance bored me because it was too easy, and both characters were just too awesome, and they had too many awesome friends around from previous books in the series. I think you have to be in the mood for that sort of thing, and I wasn’t. I still recommend the author because female military pilots! The Night Is Mine was the one I liked – it had cooking neepery as well as the military setting.

Nonfiction:Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900 – 1950 by Lesley A. Hall was right up my alley so far as research material goes. Social history! Sex! The turn of the century! It made me think about how weird it is that for such a long time, and even today, information about sex is so censored and obfuscated and fraught with tension. No wonder our society is such a mess. Aside from that, the book gave me many, many ideas for historical erotica plots. A lot of men were worried about impotence or premature ejaculation, and what to do about it…clearly, they were in the wrong genre of story at the time. *ahem*

Fanfiction:Fair Winds and Homeward Sail by Ione is a story about the Crofts, beginning long before Persuasion but incorporating some of it from their point of view. Highly recommended, even if you don’t usually read fanfiction; the author beautifully captures the feel of the period and of Austen’s prose.

If you like exploring the universe of Captain America and Bucky Barnes in the 1940s, hansbekhart’s Kings County series includes two stories so far, one about Pearl Harbor and its fallout in Brooklyn, and the second all about the Barnes family on the home front.

Fiction: Partner by Lia Silver, the sequel to Prisoner; I know this author, though mostly online. I got an advance copy and read it all in one evening, and my only complaint was that it was not longer (it didn’t really need to be, I just wanted). Adventure! Angst! Music, some of which I suggested (in particular, Filipino artist Gloc-9)! I am especially happy that there are so many interesting secondary characters who could get their own books, because I am enjoying this series.

Nonfiction: High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica Harris, whose work I already knew I loved from The Africa Cookbook: Tastes of a Continent, which I bought many years ago. She synthesizes a lot of historical information to show how African foods and cooking influenced the cuisine of the United States. It made me want to read more about a number of different topics. I especially enjoyed reading about famous black caterers in Philadelphia and New York City. I didn’t find the last sections as entertaining as the earlier ones, even though they were informative. I think it was because as the time period got closer to the present, the narrative got more generalized. I mean, the whole book was an armchair journey, but I felt like there were more interesting facts and intriguing historical connections in the earlier chapters. I think the later chapters probably needed a book of their own, unless it’s just that I’m biased towards less recent history.

Fiction: Bone Rider by J. Fally features a romance between a human and alien symbiotic sentient armor…well, actually the male human’s romance is with another male human, and there is a plot involving the U.S. Army and the Russian mafia, but I was more into it for the sentient armor, which was totally cool. Really, do you need any more recommendation than that?

Nonfiction: The Regency Underworld by Donald Low – if you’re looking for a fairly short overview of this topic, this seems to be a good choice.

Fanfiction: This, You Protect by owlet follows Bucky Barnes after the events of Captain America: the Winter Soldier as he resets his mission objectives to keep Captain America safe. It has realistic angst mingled with Bucky’s sardonic humor and a lot of sentimental punch. It’s hard to describe, but a greatly entertaining story.

I was on vacation for part of December, so I got to read more than usual!

Fiction: Love Waltzes In by Alana Albertson – Contemporary romance in which the description of life as a dancer on a celebrity ballroom dance show, and the associated soap opera plot, was much more compelling than the romance, which totally failed to grab me. Heroine is a professional dancer who wants to have a family; hero was her partner and first love when they were teenagers, before he left the sport to become a marine.

Breaking the Rules (Troubleshooters Book 16) by Suzanne Brockmann – Excellent travel reading, even though it had been a long while since I read book 15. So far as I can tell, this is the last of the series. Various romances and romantic issues mingle with a human trafficking case and a custody battle, so I kept turning pages.

A Man to Die For by Eileen Dryer featured an ER nurse who realizes the hot new doctor is a serial killer. A cat-and-mouse thriller with lots of terrific ER detail (the writer was a nurse). There’s also a low-key romance with the nurse and a cop. Fun!

Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King (galley) – latest in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. Russell and Holmes go to Japan in the 1920s and then have an adventure in Oxford. I have no idea how accurate the historical detail was, but I enjoyed it.

True Pretenses (Lively St. Lemeston Book 2) by Rose Lerner, which made sense even though I haven’t read book one in the series yet. It’s a historical romance in which a Jewish con man falls for a political hostess, which doesn’t really tell you anything about the characters, who are complex and engaging and don’t always know their own minds. Bonus points for the lack of the standard arrogant dominant male and a heroine who knows what she wants and is not ashamed of wanting. One of the author’s sources was almost certainly The Regency Underworld by Donald Low. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Fiction: Still Life With Murder by P.B. Ryan – First in the Nell Sweeney series, it’s a historical mystery set in Gilded Age Boston. The heroine has a terrible past and so does the man accused of murder, whom it isn’t a huge spoiler to say isn’t guilty, because he turns up in all the rest of the books in the series (I checked). Also, he is Strangely Attractive, so it’s clear he’s a potential unwise romantic interest for the heroine. It was fairly entertaining.

Nonfiction: I read a whole array of journal articles on The Great Game for a World Fantasy panel I was assigned at the last minute, but I didn’t make any written notes in my log, alas.

Aspects of the Novel, a series of lectures by E.M. Forster – I think I must have gotten it from a free box somewhere, or very cheaply in a used bookstore; it’s been on my shelf for a long time, and I am hoping to give it away when I’m done reading it. It is just engaging enough for late night/early morning reading, and is in nice digestible chunks. There was a bit about the essential unknowability of other people that I liked; Forster pointed out that in novels, we can know everything important about a person, which gives a nice sense that we are somehow in control of things.

Fanfiction: United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) by fallingvoices and radialarch [MCU Captain America] is for those of you who enjoy meta-ish angst; it focuses on the Winter Soldier being on trial. I say -ish because the only meta part is that there are snippets of tweets between the court reports and articles and texts between characters, and those tweets are so very much what we the fans reading are thinking. I really like this kind of story – I’ve seen several of them for Captain America, playing off the idea that there would be decades of history and discussion about him while he was frozen in the ice. AO3 summary: The Associated Press @AP Winter Soldier set to stand trial for Washington D.C. massacre and treason apne.ws/1og6SWE.

Fanfiction: London Orbital by merripestin (Sherlock) features Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, Sally Donovan, and Greg Lestrade trapped together in a car all night, for a case. Snappy dialogue ensues.

October:
Fiction: The Duke of Snow and Apples by Elizabeth Vail is set in an alternate England that has magic, and felt roughly Regency to me in its social mores. It engages with a lot of things people complain about when they read romance, and attempts to do them in a way that’s entertaining (I feel the book was a success at this). The repressed hero is repressed because he thinks his emotionally-linked magic did terrible things to other people; the heroine thinks she is a failure for realistic reasons. The Duke of the title ran away from home (for very good reasons) and has been a footman since the age of 15. He’s assigned to the heroine at a house party, and is intrigued by her because he can tell she’s emotionally hiding. Both of them make mistakes in their relationship, but I felt the problems and their solutions were more sensible than in many romances, so I didn’t mind Obvious Villain Is Obvious. I especially liked that the servants were portrayed thoughtfully, both in worldbuilding details and behavior. There were some inventive uses of magic in the story as well. I’d recommend this if you like to see tropes done well.

Think of England by K. J. Charles – I started reading it while on the elliptical, stayed there for an hour, then continued while waiting for the bus, on the bus, and before I went to bed. I think it’s probably novella length, but I was still satisfied to have finished something. It’s a historical male/male romance with some historical opinions about homosexuality and religion.

Nonfiction: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth – I started reading this for a panel at World Fantasy, not knowing that a scheduling conflict would mean I would end up not being on the panel after all. Regardless, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I had read one biography of Tolkien, but this one focuses on a period of his life that’s usually ignored, and includes his closest friends from his school days. All but one of them were killed in World War One.

Fanfiction: I really enjoyed the characterization in Collected Bones of All Kinds by hansbekhart – it’s two linked Captain America: Winter Soldier stories, one about Bucky and Steve, the other about Sam and Steve. The same author wrote When I Put Away Childish Things featuring Bucky and Steve before WWII was declared, and after Pearl Harbor, which has some nice historical detail.

Fiction: I finally started to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke this month, but ran out of steam, so it’s still not finished. I state that here so I will be ashamed and go back to it, even though to date (May 2015), I still have not. I bought the book when it came out, in hardcover, and because the hardcover is ginormous I could only read it at home. Yes, I know that now there is an e-book. I am stubborn. I bought the hardcover and I am going to read it that way.

Prisoner by Lia Silver was really really fun. It reminded me a bit of the first Marjorie Liu I ever read, Shadow Touch (still my favorite one!), except with more action and less navel-gazing. The hero and heroine are utterly different from that book, and their situation isn’t the same, but anyway, I was reminded of it; something about the intensity of what the characters are dealing with. I loved how tough both hero and heroine were, and how funny the hero is. Bonus points for the heroine’s sister being a romance reader. Also, I get cited in the acknowledgments because of a long-ago music suggestion to the author! Go me!

Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy – I read this as preparation for a Readercon panel. It’s a space opera romance that distinctly reminded me of books I enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s. The genius programmer heroine is abducted into a dangerous situation against her will and is inextricably tied to the mysterious, dangerous hero in such a way that if they get too far apart, he dies. Aaangst!!!

Calculated in Death by J.D. Robb – I was meh on this one, though usually I find this series soothing in its repetitive mediocrity.

Nonfiction: Bogs, Baths and Basins: The Story of Domestic Sanitation by David Eveleigh. This was the best book ever. The author is a docent who got a lot of questions about historical defecation procedures (he didn’t put it quite like that), so he wrote a book (after an incredible amount of research). From this book I learned pretty much everything I ever wanted to know about closets and toilets and baths and showers and piping, all of it backed up (see what I did there?) with information (and lots of illustrations) from period catalogs and various sanitation reports. If you like neepery, you will love this book. It is awesome. You should probably go get a copy now.

A note here – I’ve mostly been listing nonfiction books in the month I started reading them, and combining my thoughts from throughout the time I was actually reading it. But I actually spent months reading some of these nonfiction books.

Fiction: Lessons After Dark by Isabel Cooper was much more a traditional historical romance than its predecessor, No Proper Lady, and for that reason I enjoyed it a lot less.

Nonfiction: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War by DeAnne Blanton is really, really dry in style but blew my mind at the same time. There were so many women who fought, for so many reasons and in so many ways, and so much evidence of their presence which was later forgotten or suppressed. There are so many amazing stories in this book; every one could be a novel on its own.

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes is very enlightening, though the style is dry and academic. As one might expect, most of the factual information is drawn from court cases, which may or may not have had anything to do with the actual relationship. The book begins with a marriage between an Irish indentured servant and a Black slave in 1681. This became a court case because by the laws of the time, she and her children were supposed to become slaves upon the marriage, and they did, but then the laws changed and her grandchildren sued for freedom. They lost, but then a great-grandchild sued and won. One of the author’s main points seems to be that lynching culture (and black men being accused of raping white women) didn’t become virulent until after black men gained the right to vote and thus became more of a threat to white men. The last chapters, on Reconstruction and the ensuing torture and murder, are pretty tough going as you might imagine, but the thing that struck me most is how easily I could transfer the events and the arguments to today’s news reports. That made me sad and angry, even though it wasn’t really news to me, because it’s still happening.

Fiction: The Knights of Breton Court by Maurice Broaddus (three volumes in this edition) could be described (and I think was, somewhere) as King Arthur meets The Wire. It’s brilliant and original, but I tend to find Arthuriana depressing in general because of the way the sequence ends, and this book adds the hopelessness of grinding poverty and endemic crime to that. I was not in a good place to be reading this particular book when I did, but did it anyway because I was preparing for a WisCon panel. I will likely go back to it someday to finish the trilogy. I really loved the way the names are done; it took me a second to realize “Dred” was Mordred, for instance, and I love the little shocks of recognition throughout as new elements of Arthurian canon crop up. I see what you did there! Also, I loved that almost all of the cast are People of Color.

No Proper Lady by Isabel Cooper is very Terminator: it features a female warrior from a future dystopia who travels back in time to Regency England to prevent the dystopia. What’s not to like? Except for maybe it being longer and with more issues for her to deal with. But I enjoyed it quite a bit, and bought the sequel.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn is very different from her Kitty books – for one thing, it’s not first person POV. There’s some interesting meta on superhero comics, but I never felt truly engaged with the characters, and did not feel driven to read it quickly.

London Falling by Paul Cornell is Urban Fantasy set in London, which I read because some of the lead characters are People of Color – this was preparation for the same WisCon panel for which I read the Broaddus. It was an entertaining read, but it didn’t stick with me and I didn’t feel a burning desire to read the sequel. Also, parts of it were a bit too grim for me.

Delusion in Death (In Death, Book 35) by J.D. Robb delivered the expected experience of revisiting characters who change very little, very slowly, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Prince of Silk and Thorns by Cherry Dare – I read this because I have met the author, and I was curious. The story starts out as fairly standard “dubious consent” fantasy: gorgeous, cruel prince comandeers hapless farmboy who really wants the prince despite misgivings (in other words, the plot of many 1960s Harlequin category romances). Then it shifts towards deeper characterization and lots of indulgent hurt/comfort. Lots. If you like these themes in fanfiction, you will probably also like this book.

Nonfiction: Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is so 1980s, Wow. Frequently, bits of this book made me feel like I was in college again, which is about when the book came out. There was one bit that said, in more formal academic language, essentially the same thing as “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if Smith-Rosenberg knew of Audre Lorde’s work. It was interesting to see how dramatically womens’ studies has changed over the decades.